


Heliopause

by fortunecookie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Badass Rey, Everything Hurts, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), Groundhog Day AU, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Edge of Tomorrow, Movie: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Reylo - Freeform, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, TROS Fix-It Fic, Temporary Dark!Rey, The Force Ships It, Time Loop, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, the Force works in mysterious ways, what if
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21903250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunecookie/pseuds/fortunecookie
Summary: “Ben.”He smiles—incandescent. Wavers. She is starting to lose track of how many times he has died in her arms.Rey keeps waking up to the same grey sky on the morning of the last day of the war. She must find a way to save them both from Palpatine, or re-live losing Ben at the Battle of Exegol for all eternity.A time travel fix-it fic, heavily inspired by Edge of Tomorrow and Groundhog Day.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 176
Kudos: 554





	1. Zero

0

After she buried the lightsabers outside the Lars homestead, Rey lingered to watch the binary sunset: a small, glowing comfort in a lonely universe of sand and spectres. The war was over. Palpatine was truly dead. They had won. She looked over at where the Force Ghosts of Luke and Leia had appeared and wondered if Ben would speak to her from the dead if she called for him. 

_Be with me._ A lone tumbleweed drifted over the desert in response.

Now that she was away from the celebrations on Ajan Kloss, she could feel it like a phantom limb: the severance of their Force Bond. A dull throbbing ache where another mind should have rose to meet hers. 

BB-8 whirred, a couple paces behind her. It was late, he was warning her, the Jawas might get to their ship.

Rey nodded unthinkingly. Part of her still could not believe she was really breathing, really walking and speaking. When she’d hit the ground in Exegol, she’d felt her Force signature flicker out. Then he transferred his life energy to her. All of it. She had not even known it was possible. The ancient Jedi texts had never mentioned this in their passages on healing rituals.

In the frenzy to destroy the remainder of the Sith armada, there had been little time for Rey to grieve. She had grabbed at his tunic disbelievingly, repeating his name like a summoning until Finn gently, firmly held her up. Finn didn’t say a word as they flew back to base. She held Ben’s tunic so tightly in her fists that she was scared she would set it on fire, disintegrate this final proof that _Ben Solo existed_ into pieces. 

He had been so happy when they kissed for the first and last time. He radiated. The Light emanating from him had seared her.

Here, on Tatooine, the day after the war, she felt like a scavenger again—trying to piece back something broken, trying to find the gleaming, valuable part in all the wreckage.

Rey made the jump to hyperspace, BB-8 uncharacteristically silent beside her. She watched all the stars drain away from the expanseless, cold sky. There were some sorrows you could not shoulder with droids, or Wookies, or co-generals. 

Rey had been left alone before. She knew how to bear it with the weight of metal, how to fold that frayed hope behind her gauze wrappings, how to scratch out the days on the inside of a forgotten AT-AT walker. She would survive this, however bone-deep her desolation felt. She had to let it bleed out. 

BB-8 plotted a course back to the Resistance, while Rey wistfully fell into a deep sleep.  
  
  
  
  
That night she dreamt of twin yellow lightsabers. Flowering gardens and a castle by the lake. Fresh fruit on her tongue. A quicksilver, perfect smile. The humming of the Force, balanced and bright. Her fingers no longer holding Ben’s tunic but his face, warm, bloodied, but alive. Sunkissed.  
  
  
  
  
She awoke to the sound of a thousand twangling instruments. No matter how grey and rainy the sky over the jungle moon could be, the full breadth of tropical life on Ajan Kloss never failed to amaze her: the roots of all the Force-sensitive trees, the frenzied mating and dying of all the insects, the firing engines of all the docking ships, the buzzing Force signatures of all the Resistance members as they went about their day. 

She jumped out of her bunk. Something wasn’t right. 

Rey could sense the General’s presence. As if she was still alive. Was this a trick of Palpatine’s, from the grave? Or was Leia a particularly strong Force Ghost, like Luke, catching the lightsaber she’d flung into the fire on Ahch-To—perhaps she had a message for her from Ben? 

The General walked into her quarters, flesh and blood, as if Rey hadn’t felt her smothered by the galaxy as she stabbed her only son. Leia, as impeccable as ever in her braided crown and military vest. 

“I was thinking we could try communicating with the Jedi that came before, as a war strategy…” She looked over at Rey, who went completely numb. 

Was it possible—? 

Leia quizzically looked her over. “Rey, are you feeling alright?”

Instinct told her to say yes. “Just a little tired.” 

The General’s eyes softened just slightly and she nodded curtly. “Take some time to eat something. I’ll see you outside for training at oh nine hundred hours.” 

When Leia left, Rey let her mind wander outside the camp barracks—how was Leia alive? Unless—she latched onto the nearest Force signature, hovered over the edge of her consciousness. A Resistance pilot, clocking in today’s shift. 

Rey’s eyes widened as she read the date on the RZ-2 A-wing interceptor’s monitor. Today. Yesterday. 

Somehow, she was reliving the last day of the war. And if the General was alive that meant—Ben was alive. 

Rey tentatively reached for their bond. Yes. She could feel the rage simmering just below the surface of his carefully guarded mental shields, all the rest of his emotions frustratingly opaque but _there._ Whole. 

She nearly wept with relief, and she felt a ripple of shock on his end of the bond that she had willingly searched for him in the Force and felt _happy_ he was there—Rey hesitated, and then cut off their contact. This was Kylo she was dealing with now, masked and armed and unkissed.

If she was truly in yesterday’s time, Palpatine was alive, too. Rey breathed out. Steady. She remembered the heat of Ben’s hand on her ribs, regenerating muscle tissue, commanding her lungs to draw breath, bringing back what was dead.   
  
_Be with me._ She was not going to let Ben Solo die again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Saturn" by Sleeping at Last


	2. One

1

As she meditated, Rey began to doubt herself. Perhaps she’d had a prophetic vision in her sleep—much like when she touched Ben’s hand through the bond. Could it really be possible that she had traveled back in time? Her body showed no signs of the last stand against Palpatine: no aches, no scars. No bruises where she had crumpled against cold rock. Even the blisters from the training droid’s blaster shots were gone when she inspected herself in the fresher that morning. 

Only the excruciating memory of Ben’s warm lips remained.

“Be with me. Be with me,” Rey muttered. Unlike on Exegol, the Jedi spirits were frustratingly silent. They had no answers for her paradox. 

Nevermind. She would see how closely her vision hewed to today’s reality. Rey floated back to the ground. 

“They’re not with me,” she said to Leia, furrowing her eyebrows.

“Nothing is impossible.” Leia spoke patiently, as if talking to a child. The sun gleamed on her gold earrings, and in the mist of the rainforest, the General’s face glowed with uncanny vitality.

_Nothing is impossible._ Rey leaped across a gorge and rolled to a defence stance. According to the order of the previous day’s events, she was supposed to have an agonizing headache soon, courtesy of Kylo Ren (and she suspected, the relic of Darth Vader’s helmet). She swung her lightsaber viciously around the trees like a javelin—she had done that before, right?— _kriff—  
  
  
  
  
_ _Ochi’s ship, her own earsplitting cry, Ben’s eyes widening at Luke’s lightsaber, Unkar Plutt’s vice-grip, the rubble of the Jedi temple, the hiss of Kylo’s bloodred crossguard lightsaber, Snoke’s voice coaxing his apprentice, herself as Empress Palpatine, the gutted expression on her mother’s face, the Jedi-Hunter impaling her father, Snoke ripping through Kylo’s mind, Han falling off the bridge, no, no—  
  
  
  
  
_ Panting, she struck the droid deadcenter with her quarterstaff, something else besides her childhood scream ringing in her head. 

Rey ran back to her quarters, ransacking her collection of Jedi texts. What had killed Ben was his sacrifice to save her. Would there be any mention in the Jedi archives of what Kylo had called them—a dyad in the force? If she could find something, anything, maybe she could glean a new advantage. A clue to defeat the Emperor, turn Kylo to the Light faster, or stop the Sith fleet. 

Dusk fell over the camp. Rey was still poring over the ancient scriptures of Aionomica and Rammahgon when she finally spotted it on the yellowing page of the Uneti-wood book: a faded illustration of a man and a woman crowned with the sun and the moon, framed against the symbol of the pebbled pond she’d seen on Luke’s training grounds. The man’s wild hair looked a little like Ben’s. A light-lettered rune noted the phenomenon of pairs born with complementary Force signatures. But the ciphers only told her what she already knew, and nothing of how to pool the energy of the two Force-users—she slumped against her seat. 

_Unseen in generations_ , indeed.  
  
  
  
  
  
“Falcon’s back!” 

Rey tried to look excited as she ran down to the flaming freighter.  
  
  
  
  
In her hurry to search for a clue on exploiting the Force bond, Rey had forgotten to rescue BB-8 from the fallen logs. When Poe found him, the astromech’s gravity receptors were off-balance, and the droid spun around in all directions. Rey felt just as disoriented as the droid. 

What, if anything, could she do differently today to prevent the tragedy she knew was coming?  
  
  
  
  
Even though this was the second time she’d heard it, the intel debrief was as awful as Rey remembered.

“Somehow, Palpatine returned.” 

An uproar seized the Resistance members. For the first time, Rey noticed the full range of expressions on the Resistance members’ faces—ranging from the crestfallen to the outright incredulous. She drank in the sight of their motley crew, assembled together. Some of these pilots wouldn’t live to see tomorrow—but right now, Snap Wexley was protesting what was he thought was sure to be a red herring. 

Poe finished his report, his eyes downcast. “Palpatine’s been out there all the time, pulling the strings.” 

Leia spoke up. “Always, in the shadows from the very beginning.”

With a jolt, Rey realised that as Leia corroborated the Resistance’s worst fears, _the General knew Rey was a Palpatine._ Rey quickly looked away, staring at her calloused hands. The hands which had conjured Force lightning, killed Chewie (or so she had believed), and confidently wielded a crimson dual-bladed lightsaber in her nightmares. Everyone was shuddering at Palpatine’s resurrection, and his very grandchild was standing amongst them. Leia, the last princess of a planet swallowed by the wrath of the Dark Side, had always held out hope for her and Ben Solo to become more than what their bloodlines wrought.

Rey left the command meeting, a tide of emotion welling inside her. _She still trained me._ She gathered Luke’s journals. Like before, Rey asked to speak to her alone about her plan to hunt down the emperor. Unlike before, now she knew why the General had shut down her mission despite it making _perfect sense_ , why Leia had looked so plaintive as she said _no_. Leia, who had been imprisoned and tortured by her father on the Death Star. Who knew that the only family Rey had was waiting in Exegol to turn her to the Dark Side.  
  
  
  
  
This time, Rey politely but firmly doesn’t let the beautiful alien child give her the necklace. She avoids the shadow-puppet theatre for the younglings, scans the festival for speeders they can hijack. 

The bond flickers into life, and the whole world plunges into nightfall.  
  
"Palpatine wants you dead.”

Rey had forgotten how much she hated that mask. 

“Serving another master?”

“No. I have other plans. I offered you my hand once. You wanted to take it. Why didn’t you?”

How eerie to hear everything again. Ben’s voice through the modulator. 

It was easier the first time to retort, “You could have killed me. Why didn’t you?” Now, with the knowledge that Ben did quite the opposite, it tumbles out halfheartedly. Kylo isn’t really her enemy—Rey knew that ever since she delivered herself in an escape pod to Snoke's ship. Belatedly, Rey realises her question sounds more rueful than confrontational. Kylo senses the tone shift, freezes, and doesn’t lunge at her. He abruptly shuts their connection. 

No sandtroopers with jetpacks shooting from the sky. It’s so easy this time that Snap Wexley never has to fake optimism for the General. They do fall into quicksand again, but Rey figures there’s no way around that. To the team, who can’t quite believe their good luck, Rey smoothly attributes all of her instincts to the Force. _A feeling._ Finn looks at her a little oddly as she explains recognising the tunnelling patterns of Vexis snakes, but they track down the Sith wayfinder, so no-one’s thinking too hard about why Rey seems to know this planet intimately. 

Kylo doesn’t come for them. Chewie never dies. 

Rey stands out in the Pasaana desert long enough to realise the foolishness of what she’s doing. The first time, she had ventured outside to sort out her confusion at recognizing the landscape from her nightmares. Now, Rey wonders if a part of her was looking forward to slashing Kylo’s TIE fighter, watching him rise from the ashes without his stupid helmet. She wonders if she should be worried; if she’s already changed too much in this timeline, since Kylo never comes, never pushes her.  
  
  
  
  
They don’t have to mount a Star Destroyer break-in, but they still trace Babu Frik on Kijimi, and hack C3PO’s circuit boards to access the illegal translation in his memory bank. Zorii keeps her captain’s medallion. They sprint back to the Millennium Falcon in the deathly snow squall, disguised by the chaos of the rampant pillaging of the town—their footsteps covered by the cries of children, the clanging manacles of enslaved beasts, and families begging the faceless stormtroopers to spare them. 

With a pang of regret, Rey thinks maybe she should have done something—anything—to prevent Kijimi’s destruction by the laser cannons.  
  
  
  
  
“You know why the Emperor’s always wanted you dead.” 

“No.”

Their lightsabers hum against each other. Mesmerized by Kylo’s wine-red blade, Rey thinks she should have always seen this coming—their lightsaber battles were always too well-matched, too fluid. They fought better than they talked.

She’s not in Kylo’s quarters this time, but he still says, “I’ll come tell you.”  
  
  
  
  
Rey imagines a fortress with unscalable walls. She needs her mind to stay like that, secured against the distraction of her other half on the edge of the Force bond if she will save them both. 

It was a miracle she didn’t die the first time steering the skimmer. The magnetic radiation of the Death Star ripples throughout the waters, interfering the natural order of the tides on the ocean moon. Rey curses as she chokes on another mouthful of saltwater. Her arms feel like lead. She grits her teeth, rattling from the cold. Once is enough.

When she climbs up the colossal wreck, the Emperor’s throne whispers to her of glorious empires where no-one scavenges for a living, a new _pax univers_ , with shades named Ben Solo who will live forever.  
  
  
  
  
“You are a Palpatine. My mother was the daughter of Vader. Your father was the son of the Emperor. What Palpatine doesn’t know is we’re a dyad in the Force. Two that are one. We’ll kill him together and take the throne.”

He tells her on Kef Bir, holding the Emperor’s wayfinder in his gloved hand. 

“Look at you. You wanted to prove to my mother that you were Jedi and you’ve proven quite the opposite. You can’t go back to her now. Like I can’t.” 

Something gives in his eyes. His voice is flat, the wayfinder clutched in his hand. His lightsaber is ignited. But his eyes are too pleading. “Come with me to Exegol.” 

She wants to howl at him, she wants to tell him he has only two hours left. _You_ _foolish boy_. The yawning cavity in her chest grows.  
  
  
  
  
The outer bridges of the Death Star are rusting, slick with rain. Tidal waves pummel them over and over again. Rey parries Kylo’s blows as best she can under the assault of the deluge, their lightsabers grating against the corroded structure. The metal shrieks, steam rising out of the incision. She doesn't consciously change anything about their duel except for the last moment. When Rey finds herself pushed against the defunct turret, instinctively tensing for the blow that won’t come, Rey can’t stomach stabbing Kylo again with his own lightsaber. Instead, she catches it as it falls, ignites the blade an inch away from Ben’s neck. 

She doesn’t need to pierce his chest. They hear the General’s last word, the final knife wound in Kylo Ren. Ben turns his head—the sentence is half-formed in his mind, hanging in the Force-charged air— _Mom?—_

Rey holds Ben at saberpoint, hands shaking like Ben’s full-body trembling, tears streaming down her face. She feels it, Ben feels it, as Leia’s Light is snuffed out by the galaxy. This may be the second iteration of Leia's death, but Rey feels more adrift than ever. Leia doesn’t hear Ben’s lightspeed thought.  
  
“Ben.” 

He grimaces. They’re not fighting anymore. (She remembers the red room, the Praetorian Guards, the singing in her soul when Kylo killed his true enemy—Snoke, not her. Rey hasn’t been Kylo’s _true enemy_ in a while.)

She steps forward, deactivates both lightsabers. Calculates the risk, and then seizes Ben’s arms. Pulls him into a formless embrace. She lets the sabers fall with a thundering clatter as Ben just stands there. She places a hand on his neck and breathes. Steady. 

When he lifts his head off her shoulder, his eyes are glassy and unfocused. Rey takes his gloved hand and guides him to the angry gash she gave him on Starkiller Base—the red welt is disappearing, the skin re-knitting itself.

Rey continues gripping Ben’s hand.

“Your mother loved you, Ben,” she shouts, over the roaring tides. _She loved you when you were going to shoot her down on the Raddus. She loved you when you took Han’s life._ _She loved you when you rejected Luke._ The seaspray falls all around them. “You can still come home. What your mother stood for—her people need you. Come with me to Exegol. We’ll defeat Palpatine together, for your mother.” 

Ben shakes violently. 

Rey reaches in gently, bears all of his pain like the pieces of Kylo's shattered mask. She transmits back all the tenderness she can muster through the bond. She leaves him and plants the words through the Force. A whisper. _  
  
I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand.  
  
  
  
  
_ In the end, it doesn’t make a difference. 

Right after they overpower Palpatine’s guards and the Knights, Rey tries to force freeze Ben away from the Sith Throne, preventing the Emperor from snatching both of their life forces. _Trust me_ , she begs Ben, who is aghast at Rey's self-sacrifice. She can feel Ben resisting, straining to face Palpatine by her side. 

Palpatine cackles above them.

“No… If you stand together, you’ll die together!” The Emperor drills through the protective shield wrapped around Ben. The diversion only grants them a split-second more. 

A guttural scream, suspended in the hellish atmosphere of the hidden Sith world. Palpatine feeds greedily on their bond. Impossible to tell whether the scream is Rey’s or Ben’s.  
  
  
  
  
When Rey wakes up, Ben is already gone. 

“These are your final steps, Rey. Rise and take them.” 

She channels all the generations of Jedi before her with a new, frenzied anguish. It hadn’t been enough. Ben was going to die again. Ben’s knuckles brushing against hers. His mercurial smile. A bloodied tunic. Vanishing. The bond amputated by the creature who had been _every voice Ben had ever heard inside his head, tormenting him_ —

Rey refracts Palpatine’s Force lightning, just barely, as her fingertips begin to tingle with static energy.  
  
  
  
  
She dies. She _knows_ she dies. And this time, like before, Ben surrenders all his strength and resurrects her.

She awakes to dark eyes full of wonder. Rey wishes she had a different ending to deliver, but she doesn’t. So she gives this Ben a kiss, urgent and deep, desperate for him to know before—

He beams. Dissipates in her arms. And something inside Rey is made more brittle, more hollow.  
  
  
  
  
It is the morning of the last day of the war. Rey wakes up to an anaemic, bloodless sky over Ajan Kloss. She can taste the ashes in her mouth. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Hey, Ma" by Bon Iver


	3. Two

2  
  
Rey wonders what happens to Jedi who go mad. 

It’s almost too easy to respond in the same way to every little decision of this day, from what she eats in the canteen after she wakes up at oh-seven-hundred (the same breakfast of veg-meat, freeze-dried bone broth, and portion bread), to her conversations with the other Resistance members ( _you’re a difficult man_ ), to the mind-numbing battle sequences (Pasaana, Kef Bir, Exegol, Pasaana, Kef Bir, Exegol). Sometimes she loses track of what’s happened in which cycle. Rey tries, of course, to modify certain routes. But more often than not she finds herself flying back to the ground after levitating, telling the General that she’s _starting to think it’s impossible_.

When she meditates, Rey remembers the underwater cave in Ahch-To. The lurching cold, her manifold selves. A thousand Reys turning in unison. She wasn’t afraid then, gazing into that looking-glass. But she is now. Maybe there’s no end. Maybe the mirror was right when she asked to see her family and all she saw was her own companionless reflection. Perhaps her destiny is forged already by the sound of Ben’s body hitting stone.

_I’ve never felt so alone._

This time, there’s no-one reaching for her hand across the galaxy to tell her she’s not.  
  
  
  
  
In the fifth simulation, Rey sneaks out of camp on a solo mission. Why go to Pasaana, she figures, if she already knows she’ll need the Emperor’s wayfinder and Kylo’s transformation on Kef Bir? She’s never been this reckless in reassembling the day’s timeline, but Rey’s so very _tired_. She doesn’t think she can keep it up much longer, all this dying and being resurrected. All the _Ben_ ’s that have haunted her.  
  
  
  
  
There’s no _alone with friends_ this run _._ She feels too skittish for company, like a trapped thissermount on Jakku. If she leaves Ajan Kloss before her morning training, the General will raise the alarms. So Rey goes through the motions, hacking the trees a little too violently to terminate the training droid. Afterwards, Rey easily gains access to the hanger bay. She Force-persuades the crew to let her board a T-70 X-Wing under the guise of Leia’s orders. There’s a twinge of guilt as she tugs their thoughts into place, but Rey hopes that Leia will be too preoccupied with compiling intel on the First Order to sense her escape.

Rey is just about to fire up the fusial thrust split-engines when Leia intercepts her on the comms. 

“Rey?” The hologram glitches in and out of focus. The General’s pixellated face is haggard, and a little frightened. “What are you _doing_?”

Rey can only imagine what she looks like in return: the last hope of the Jedi stealing a Resistance ship, flying off-charts to coordinates in the middle of nowhere. Luke abandoning the cause all over again. Han retreating back into a life of smuggling over intergalactic politics.

“Master, forgive me,” she implores Leia. Rey tries to center her emotions, school her expression into something more beseeching than borderline-betrayal. “Something’s happened in the Force. Just now, on the training course I—I had a vision. Of how I can win the war. But I need to go alone. Please, I know how bad this looks, but please, trust me.”

Leia is taken aback. “What kind of vision?”

Rey doesn’t know how much she should risk telling her. But Rey suspects, like her confrontation with Luke that devastating night on Ahch-To, that the General might let her go if she believes Rey’s trying to pull Kylo Ren to the Light.

“I saw the future—Kylo Ren and I standing before the dead Emperor. The throne of the Sith. We kill him, together. We end the war.” 

Leia’s eyes widen in shock. She’s looking at her as if Rey just began speaking Huttese. “You—how do you know the Emperor has returned?” 

Rey lies. “I didn’t know until the vision—I thought it was a bad dream, so I didn’t mention it this morning. But Finn sent me a coded message on my personal comms unit—there’s been rumours around the port where they picked up the spy’s message. General, if this is true, I know how to fix everything and I need to _go now._ ” The reassurance should soothe Leia, but Rey sees the General blanche. _Palpatine’s granddaughter. Cryptic voices in a young, untrained mind._

She looks far too resigned than Rey would like.

“I know it looks like I’m making excuses. But I won’t fail you, Master,” Rey says fiercely. “I need to finish what Luke started. Destroy the Emperor. Bring peace to the galaxy. With Ben beside me.”

There’s a long pause. The radio is muffled, and Rey realises that the General hasn’t taken this call in the command room—she’s moved into her quarters. A veneer of privacy on the base. 

“Rey,” she says, slowly. “What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me? Don’t tell me what things look like. Tell me what they are.”

Rey’s hand is primed to punch the hyperdrive. She realizes only when the teardrops hit the control keypad that she’s crying. She can’t tell Leia _what things actually are,_ not anymore. 

“I’m just tired,” she says. It’s as close to the truth as she can get. “But I want the war to be over, and I know how to win it. I promise you.” 

Leia closes her eyes for a fraction of a second. Her silence is palpable.

“I don’t want to go without your blessing, but I will. It’s what you would do.” 

Rey imagines a thousand of her selves speaking these words on a thousand different days.

She pulls the accelerator, launches the starfighter into that selfsame godforsaken sky.  
  
  
  
  
Leia doesn’t know her the way Ben can read her. But the General sends the thought to her nevertheless as the X-Wing makes its way to Kef Bir.

_Rey, never be afraid of who you are._  
  
  
  
  
The most jarring thing about the loop, besides the continuous cycle of death in Palpatine’s lair, is the reverberation of certain phrases. It’s as if Rey can shuffle the order of the day’s events, like a sabacc deck, but the cards remain the same. The General tells her _nothing is impossible_ countless times and Rey begins not to hear it. Her own responses are automatic, artificial. 

That’s why this version of the duel on Kef Bir is a surprise. 

She’s fighting Kylo, vaulting through a tidal wave to land on the next section of the bridge. By now, she’s memorised the schematics. He follows her. The breakneck waters continue to bombard them, dousing both Rey and Kylo as they match each other blow-for-blow. She can’t distinguish her sweat from the rain. Every ligament in her body is straining. But even in this visceral battle, with the solid concrete beneath her feet, the hot hazard of Kylo’s saber inches away from her face, and the raw muscle behind each strike—Rey doesn’t quite feel _here._ Everything is just too unreal. Too waterlogged, too foggy. She moves, but she can’t shake off the feeling that her body isn’t on this ocean moon, that it’s on Exegol, being revived by Ben Solo. 

Rey registers too late that she’s backed against the turret. She’s in the same prone position with Kylo’s impassive lightsaber raised high above her. 

Rey is so very tired. 

Maybe it’s because she’s fatigued from watching Ben drained away before her day after day. Or maybe it’s because the General has lost a little more of her precious stores of hope, because she thinks Rey _left_ her, them. 

There’s no time to counter the blow Rey thought would not come with her Skywalker saber. There’s no incoming disturbance in the Force, no mother’s call across the universe to waylay Kylo’s path. With a discharge of pure panic, Rey grasps the gravity around her, manages to shove herself out of the fatal arc of Kylo’s saber—

Kylo cuts her face. 

The pain blooms over their bond. 

He steps back, gloved hand trembling. His face is too pale. Feverish. She can feel his agitation over their Force connection, sharp as a blade. _Why didn’t you block with your lightsaber, foolish girl, we’re supposed to kill the Emperor together, not each other—_

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, Rey thinks hazily. She needs a bacta pack. 

Only now does Leia’s voice cut through the mist and the blood. 

_“Ben.”_

Kylo Ren turns. Drops the lightsaber as if it’s scalded him. 

Leia exhales her last breath.  
  
  
  
  
This isn’t part of the script. 

Ben’s swaying, on his knees, head in his hands. She can feel the nausea rolling off him in waves. She can’t speak without moving her lacerated cheek so she says it through the Force. 

_Ben, listen to me._ He does look at her. Eyes vacant. 

She gleans the fragments of _his future, solid and clear._ The future she’d sensed when they made physical contact for the first time through the bond that night on Ahch-To. Amidst the raging waters, Rey anchors his spirit, guides him in the breathing rituals Luke taught her _. I forgive you. Your mother forgives you. Your mother forgives you..._

He’s shuddering, gasping for air. Gradually, his shoulders begin to heave up and down. Rain drizzles over the discarded lightsabers.

This time, Ben cries for them both. 

_Maybe I was supposed to die like this,_ Rey thinks. She catches his fingers, holds his hand tight.   
  
She passes the thought gently to him. A bright, bittersweet, uncut thought. Globed like fruit after winter.  
  
_I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand._

(That part stays the same. Always.)  
  
  
  
  
Stray tears fall on Rey’s shirt. Ben doesn’t say anything, just clings to her hand with a white-hot grip. They lie there: a Jedi and a Sith on the skeleton of the Death Star. 

Then, with an almost imperceptible inhale, Ben reaches out, like by the fireside on Ahch-To. Cautiously, he cups her right cheek with his bare hand. 

He breathes out. Steady. 

_Oh,_ Rey thinks. Dumbstruck. This is what he must have looked like when he healed her on Exegol. 

The wound closes. The Force bandages her, bathes her skin, regenerating dead blood cells. Everything is so unfathomably warm. 

Ben looks down at his hands as if seeing them for the first time.  
  
  
  
  
She watches the TIE-fighter take off until it's the tiniest mote in the sky. Rey doesn’t move from the turret in a long while.  
  
  
  
  
Finn is _furious_ when he finds her on Kef Bir. 

“What were you _thinking,_ going alone to find the Emperor?” He yells over the waves as he helps her up the Falcon. Chewie growls at her from the co-pilot’s seat. “Telling the General I sent you a transmission? Have you lost your _mind_?” 

After she’s reassured him that _no,_ she’s still sane (somewhat), _yes,_ she’s found the location of Exegol, _yes_ , she fought Kylo Ren and she’s fine now—only then is he satisfied. He shakes his head. Chewie grunts in Shyriiwook, _don’t do that again._

They’ve about to make the jump to hyperspace when she realises they’re not going back to base. 

“No time,” Finn explains. “We’re escorting you to Exegol. General’s last orders." He looks away. "We go together.”

Rey is simultaneously, deeply touched and _horrified.  
  
  
  
  
_ Just as they begin their descent, Rey musters all her Force persuasion. Before Finn gets a chance to grab his blaster, before Chewie cocks his crossbow, she commands them to _sleep._ They slump over their seats. She erects a force field around the ship, just in case.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.  
  
  
  
  
“Long have I waited, and now your coming together is your undoing.”

Palpatine is as vile as ever. His lidless, white eyeballs roll into his head as he wrenches the life out of the two of them. 

Rey can feel Ben resisting—she's going to dislocate her heart at this rate—  
  
  
  
  
“The force will be with you. Always.” 

Rey knows what she has to do but she doesn’t know if she has the strength to do it. 

She hoists herself up. Takes her steps in purgatory. Channels the Emperor’s Force lightning with a hysteric fit of _power_. Watches the skin peel away from his skull, decompose into dust in-between her crossed lightsabers.  
  
  
  
  
She wonders what Finn and Chewie see when they awake from their slumber:

A maybe-Jedi and a maybe-Sith on a hidden planet in front of a throne. The Jedi-Killer hobbling towards her, cradling her limp form in his arms. The ruins of an ancient order all around them.

He breathes. Steady. (This part stays the same. Always.)

_ “Ben.”  _

She can see that he’s worse off than in previous simulations. His eyes are sunken. Healing her scar on Kef Bir depleted something of his life force.

Rey surges forward to kiss him. Ben’s mouth twitches upwards. His body dissolves during the kiss.  
  
  
  
  
It is the morning of the last day of the war. Rey wakes up to a featureless, fine sky like mourning linens over Ajan Kloss. The birds in the forest have stopped singing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Visions of Gideon" by Sufjan Stevens
> 
> Author's Note: Thank you so much for all of your support. Your comments, kudos, and bookmarks have been fuelling my late-night writing sessions this winter holiday season! Also, thank you for bearing with the profound angst of these past three chapters. I've outlined seven more chapters of this fic, and though we still have a ways to go, I promise we're working towards a (hard-won) happy ending here for both Rey and Ben, folks. 
> 
> Next chapter: Rey talks to Kylo through the bond. (Like, really talks.)


	4. Three

3

Rey tries to tally the days on her bedside wall, but the marks always disappear by the next cycle. 

To keep track of the time loop, Rey visualises the previous simulation, as best she can, the moment she awakes. She pictures holocrons slotting into shelves in a white, timeless library. She archives it all. The exact spot in the ship where her parents were stabbed. The chanting of the medieval Sith ritual. Her fingers curling around the nape of Ben’s neck. The mass of the lightsaber transplanted into Ben’s hand. The bruising kiss. A blinding wattage. 

She can’t carry anything with her into the next day’s battle, so she stores up all these half lives. 

“Rey, be patient.” Leia says. Rey falls back to earth. Over and over again.  
  
  
  
  
She’s in the seventh or eighth simulation, balancing on a tightrope stretched over a ravine. Water rushes beneath her as she swiftly deflects the droid’s shots. She can’t stop thinking about the illustration of the dyad she found in the Aionomicum. There must be a way. She’s running when Kylo lassoes her mind, reining her into his ruminations. Rey instinctively resists, and then lets him, lets herself dropinto the abyss— 

_ Ochi’s ship her own earsplitting cry Ben’s eyes widening at Luke’s lightsaber her ribs gaunt after a season of starvation the other Jedi disciples raising their lightsabers against Ben Snoke whispering  _ do it _ the hiss of Kylo’s bloodred crossguard lightsaber  _ _ Kylo’s leather grip around her elbow leading her to Snoke the gutted expression on her mother’s face the Jedi-Hunter impaling her father the unalloyed dejection of  _ don’t go this way _ Kylo viewing his mother’s infrared signature through the TIE-fighter weapons system panel Rey’s hand on Kylo’s thigh in the red room like a compass the world gone white  _ _ snowfall on Starkiller Base salvaging Darth Vader’s helmet on Mustafar Han falling off the bridge a pair of shining lucky dice Leia in her senatorial attire waving goodbye to him her childhood dreams of a cool ocean the Sith Eternal bowing down to both of them the New Emperor and Empress— _

Rey gasps, head pounding. Thunder fulminates in the distance. All the trees in the clearing fall down. 

She can see him in his quarters. He looks directly at her, snatches his hand away from Vader's mask. 

Rey remembers a little boy who’s just started moving things with the Force. A lonely dark-haired child sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of the Falcon, floating dice in his palm. 

_I see through the cracks in your mask. You’re haunted._

Kylo Ren doesn’t answer.  
  
  
  
  
Rey’s lived this day so many times, but this is new. Jolting. The bond is a copper wire singing electricity. Maybe it’s all the life force being transferred between her and Ben. Or maybe she really is getting stronger, more mettlesome, learning to manipulate the bond at will. 

She’s angrier nowadays. She finds it easier to submerge herself into his consciousness, dark and unpredictable when everything else unfolds to the blueprint: the attack on the Aki-Aki Festival, the bombings on Kijimi. She’s better now at keeping certain things hidden from Kylo’s prying mind. Like the sheen of Ben’s unkempt hair. His face suffused in the ultramarine of his mother’s lightsaber.  
  
  
  
  
  
Before she leaves Ajan Kloss, the General bids her farewell. Rey etches this goodbye in her memory-bank. This woman, who flew through space on sheer will—a satellite, a beacon. 

“There’s so much I want to tell you,” Rey says. _About Ben. About me._

“Tell me when you get back,” Leia answers, not unkindly. 

_Yes,_ Rey thinks as Leia enfolds her in her arms. The Death Star is calling. The bond glows in the back of her mind like something atomised, radioactive.

Leia’s hair smells like emerald grapes, the last preserved vintages of Alderaan.

She’s en route to Pasaana when she asks him.

_Where’s Mustafar?_

Kylo’s finished a meeting in the command bridge. She sense his intense displeasure: some officer on the elite council must have defied him. The Knights of Ren surround him, wielding their battle-axes and scythes. He dismisses the Knights and turns to her in the corridor. Trying to gauge her interest.

_Why do you want to know?_

_It was in your mind,_ Rey muses. _It seemed…important._ She’s repairing the wiring of the Falcon’s auxiliary cooling system. He’ll probably be able to see that. She’s careful to make it seem like any other Resistance fleet ship.

This time, Rey’s decided to extract as much information as possible from Kylo Ren. She knows how her side of the day goes. What about his? If she can piece together the day’s events ( _two that are one_ ) maybe she’ll be able to extricate Ben Solo faster, exhume Kylo Ren’s ashes. 

She can’t make out his expression underneath the mask, but she knows her way around the icy tundra of his mind. She’d tried searching _Mustafar_ in R2D2’s hard drive, but like Exegol—nothing. There was something potent about Kylo’s reaction to the place that made her wonder if it meant something to him. Rifts in his memory. She stepped on the faultlines.  
  
 _A Symeong metalsmith smelting his helmet, fiery forests with dead irontrees, a pyramidal wayfinder made of Kathol resin, hooded natives defending a casket, lava flowing backwards over a volcanic wasteland, bleeding kyber crystals, a derelict old castle—_

_Get out of my head._

_Oh, sure,_ Rey retorts. She remembers the beginning of the bond, their shared suspicion. Now—a peculiar constant. Position zero.

There’s a pause while Kylo searches her mind. _You want to find the Emperor. You’re too late. I obtained the wayfinder from Mustafar._

Rey shrugs. _There’s others. I’ll find them. You’ll see._

Kylo is boarding his TIE-fighter. He’s cloaking the vehicle, revving up the twin ion engines. She can’t tell where he’s headed, but she has a feeling it’s to hunt her down. 

_The Emperor wants you dead._

The first time he told her this, she’d thought it was a threat, Ren’s blunt way of rubbing salt into old wounds. (She’d recalled his terrible request, hand outstretched against the tattered remains of Snoke’s throne room—her ragged hopes.) Now, Rey discerns the thinly-veiled warning behind his words. 

_What has he offered you?_

_Everything. A new empire._

She hears the echo in Palpatine’s decrepit voice, hanging from the pipes of the Sith magic apparatus. Rey scoffs, knowing it can’t be _everything_ , because Kylo’s rancour is barely contained. She doesn’t need to be a Dark Side Force user to feel it—Kylo wants to guillotine him, disembowel the Emperor like he did Snoke. Palpatine is a means to an ends. She remembers the manic look in Kylo’s eyes on the _Supremacy_. The inferno of his profession: _you’re nothing, but not to me_. The bitten-back, stitched-on _please._ The lightsaber cracking in two, a world gone white. Her leaving.

Rey finally comprehends, with no small amount of awe, that Palpatine failed because he didn’t offer Kylo Ren herself as a ruling partner. 

_He didn’t offer you me. So you have other plans_. 

(Years ago, a scavenger crudely breaking into the circuitry of another’s nervous system: _You’re afraid. That you’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader._ )

Kylo doesn’t deny her statement. The truth pulsates through the bond. He takes off the infernal helmet. 

_You’ll join me._ He surveys her with his eyes, daring her to contradict him. _I’m going to find you, and I’m going to turn you to the dark side, by offering you my hand again. You’ll take it. We’ll kill him together and take the throne._

Yes, Rey thinks. Ben will offer his hand—everything—to her. She closes her eyes, locks away the moment she sensed Ben sprinting towards her with _only a blaster_ to save her from Palpatine. 

_He’ll kill you,_ Rey tells him wearily. She doesn’t try to hide her misery. _He’ll kill you, Ben.  
  
  
  
  
_ There’s a charge, a gravity to grief. Rey learns to draw on it like a magnet. They duel on Kef Bir, lightsabers clashing against fate. The seas refuse to part for them. 

“You can’t hide, Rey. Not from me,” Kylo shouts over the downpour. _Such pain in you, such anger._ He freezes her lightsaber, the same lightsaber they’d wrenched apart on Snoke’s star destroyer—

Rey wishes he would stop saying things she already knows. Her eyes flash, reflecting the red ichor of Kylo’s blade, the dried riverbeds and molten lava of a planet far away from here.  
  
  
  
  
_Ben._

When the General calls for her son this time, Rey Force pulls Kylo to his knees. She catches his lightsaber in a headlong motion, ignites both blades. Holds them steady in an X-formation against both sides of his neck as if to execute him. An unpremeditated move, accidentally culled from Kylo’s muscle memory— 

_Leia._

There’s no fear. Everything weak drilled out of him by the voices in his head. What’s left is the aftershocks of his mother’s death. Images swimming in the brain: a ribboned braid, a belt buckle, a burnished ring. That prismatic _Ben_ , a dampened ringing. Kylo lets Rey trap him. Something unravelled with the lifeline of Leia’s love. 

He expects her to kill him. He asks Rey with his eyes to kill him. 

She can’t. The lightsabers hit the ground. Futile devices.  
  
  
  
  
In the end, Rey does the Force equivalent of sedating him—with their augmented bond, the paroxysm of his guilt is too much. Her fingers graze his forehead, grant him a dreamless sleep. She’s plugging in the coordinates in the TIE fighter, Ben’s slumped figure crammed behind her in the cockpit, when it strikes Rey that this is the exact reversal of what he’d done to her in Takodana. 

She flies to the only planet she can think of that will allow them to land. An island with oceans that stretches for thousands and thousands of miles.  
  
  
  
  
He awakes. Rey’s sitting opposite him. They’re in the same hut Rey was living in, before she left Luke. 

He takes in his surroundings. The square of light from the stone window, the rolling waves outside, the gelid air. He guesses this is where Luke went to die. She slips into his consciousness—he’s remembering life on Yavin 4 under his uncle's tutelage. Solitary nights spent copying Jedi scriptures with his calligraphy set. Rainy mornings sitting under the Massassi trees in fitful meditation. Wading through swamps blindfolded to fight training droids. Luke adjusting the saber hilt in his hand, the positioning of his feet to match the Soresu form. The other students shying away whenever they had to partner off for sparring exercises. Subspace comm-ing his mother, overburdened by Senate hearings, with a terse _everything’s fine._

Ben never thought he would come here, to another Jedi temple, without the urge to destroy it.

The fire blazes, casting strange shapes over them: the Last Hope of the Resistance, the Supreme Leader of the First Order.

“You could have killed me. Why didn’t you?” Ben says at last. 

Up-close, his eyes are more chestnut-brown, like Leia’s. He’s wearing a threadbare tunic Rey found in Luke’s old residence. He's a little worse for wear, but she’s wiped the grime off his face, healed the scar she gave him on Starkiller Base. He manages to look a great deal younger. 

Rey wonders if she really has to say it. She lets him in. He could have killed her. He didn’t. He resurrects her, every damn time.

_I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand._

This time, Rey doesn’t wait for Ben to die to kiss him. She knows all about waiting. He lets her inch closer. 

He tastes as sweet as Corellian wine. 

_Oh,_ Ben thinks. Awestruck. _Oh._

The filaments of the bond are positively incandescent; his hands entangled in her hair buns. Rey sends him a lingering half-smile.  
  
  
  
  
Rey’s piloting the TIE-fighter to Exegol, the wayfinder blinking behind them. A ticking time bomb. Half an hour. The full teeth of memory. Alabaster bones, dismantled star-systems, the world beginning and ending in a flood of lightning.

“What’s the plan?” He asks her. 

“I’ll go first to Palpatine. You deal with the Knights. I’ll distract him, then we’ll overpower him together.” She unhooks Leia’s lightsaber from her belt. “Take this. Your mother would’ve wanted you to have it.”

Ben marvels at the artifact, weighing it in his palms. Leia’s Force signature permeates the starcraft. He looks at Rey as if she’s given him the sun.  
  
  
  
  
Rey watches the oblong shadows grow longer. Effigies of all the Sith Lords before Empress Palpatine. To prevent the Emperor from perceiving their bond, they’ve sealed their ends of the connection temporarily.

“Kill me, and my spirit will pass into you, as all the Sith live in me. You will be Empress. We will be one.” 

Rey thinks she’s already part of _two that are one.  
  
  
  
  
_ Ben is _brilliant_ with his mother’s lightsaber _._ Even though the bond is buried—Rey envisions a boulder blocking the entrance of a large cave—she can feel their connection, white noise humming under the surface. Rey can still sense his stamina, the galvanising pull of his Force abilities. Ben ignites the lightsaber through one of the Emperor’s guards. 

They’re so close to surviving. 

Then, Palpatine begins to claw through Rey’s mental barricades. 

Ben snarls at him, his lightsaber's trajectory aimed to wipe the Emperor’s shrivelled head off clean. Palpatine binds him, crushing his legs into the impenetrable earth. 

The Emperor’s rotten, stumped fingers regrow. 

Rey tries so very hard to hold on, but she feels as if she’s been standing for an eternity. 

Ben Solo clambers up the chasm with his injured leg, drags her out of that living tomb. Offers her _everything._

He kisses her, soot and sawdust. She tries to tells him before he goes, but his lips quirk into a smile. A quiet reverie. 

_I know._

It is the morning of the last day of the war. Rey wakes up to a cloudy sky, cold as glaucoma, over Ajan Kloss. All the oceans poured away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Mystery of Love" by Sufjan Stevens
> 
> Author's Note: Ben Solo being "a Jedi like his mother before him" is my kink. 
> 
> 12/29/19 Update: Special thanks to BurbWatcher who noticed an error in the first version of this chapter. I forgot that Ben didn't train on Ahch-To, so he wouldn't have memories with Luke there. The current version amends the hut scene so Ben's memories align with SW canon (which guesstimates the location of Luke's previous Jedi temple as Yavin 4). Please feel free to reach out if you notice any similar mistakes in the future, I'm open to any and all suggestions for improvement! 
> 
> Also--the end-of-year buzz has died down (briefly) so I finally replied to everyone's comments! Cheers!


	5. Four

4

Rey was ten years old when she ran away from Unkar Plutt’s blockhouse. He roared when he found her, threw her out the junkyard gates. _You’ll come crawling back tomorrow morning._ She walked past alleyways and cantinas clutching her quarterstaff to her chest. Her meagre possessions tightly parcelled on her back. A doll she’d made out of a discarded pilot uniform, a pair of dusty goggles, a banged-up metal water canteen, half a ration pack. Wolfish eyes in the oppressive, sweltering Jakku dark. Raking over her malnourished figure, her narrow hips. The shabby cotton band that could not disguise the swells of her tiny breasts. A bootlegger grabbed her arm. Her fear was flint-sharp. She’d ran faster than she thought she ever could. Past the Niima Outpost militia soldiers, the drunk spacers pissing outside Ergel’s Bar, the brawling gamblers who’d lost hundreds of credits on podracing. When at last Rey found herself away from the filth, the leers, she was alone in the Goazoan Badlands, certain she was going to die or be sold off to another ship graveyard owner when her supplies ran out.

She found the hulking carcass of an AT-AT walker half-buried in the sand, further out than the Carbon Ridge and the Sinking Fields. _Good_ , Rey thought, at least she wouldn’t be crushed by a luggabeast while sleeping out on the sand. And just as she’d made up her mind to return to Plutt’s hellhole the next day, if only for shelter from the greedy eyes all around her, she’d noticed the smallest sprig of life amongst the oxidised metal. Against all odds: a green spinebarrel flower, just a few millimeters tall. Growing out of the parched land.  
  
  
  
  
Rey thinks about this night often now when she awakes to a carbon-copy sky over Ajan Kloss. Sterile, gunmetal grey, like the parts of defunct Imperial ships she’d bartered for food. 

The terror of that Stygian night cannot compare to this. Miraculously, something as infinitesimal as that plant had comforted her as an orphaned child. But the sprout of the spinebarrel is nothing compared to the bond blossoming, ripe and mellow, only for Ben’s life to be reaped too soon. Desire—a desiccated, seedless starfruit. There are no more foraged nightblossoms shored up in her heart. All the flowers, all the green in the galaxy, have shrivelled up. 

Rey wakes up wanting barren ground to split beneath her. Wanting the bones, not the ghosts. Wanting the Emperor’s putrescent, lightning-charred flesh instead of Ben’s vanishing body.  
  
  
  
  
When she wakes up now, she lies very still. Tries to stop the tremor in her hands. Tries not to trigger an earthquake. She hears her voice as a Sith, silky and uncoiling. If she closes her eyes, she can reach for that dual-edged lightsaber in the forests of the night. Red like cardinal sin. No different from her quarterstaff. Carve the Emperor into pieces. 

_Never be afraid of who you are._

During one cycle on Pasaana, the memory of Ben in the hut rises, cruel and unbidden: his soft jawline in the afterglow. His coruscating smile. Their bond, a cut cable. The lightning cascades off her fingertips, explodes the left wing of Kylo’s TIE fighter the moment he enters the atmosphere. The scent of gasoline stays on her clothes. 

She’s never channeled a strike like that—so caustic. So clean. Her hand smokes for hours.

In the ninth simulation, when Kylo places his gloved hand on the Sith relic of his grandfather’s disfigured mask, her consciousness plummets straight into the Cimmerian black waters of his past—  
  
  
  
  
_The child never seems to get enough rest. The infant’s skin is always cold, even when swaddled by the richest of Core World fabrics. As a youngling, his eyes are too ancient—obsidian ores. Once, when Leia and Han argue over Han’s smuggling exploits, the dinner plates crack in half. He’s four._

_More accidents: a boy pushes him down and a tree branch falls, Leia comes back from a six-month off-planet mission and he’s sitting in the middle of shattered glass. Han looks at him strangely when he teaches him blaster firing patterns, as if to check he’s really his child. After Ben overhears his father saying_ something’s not right about the kid _all the lightbulbs on the base fuze out._

_He hears the name_ Anakin Skywalker _in a fever dream, and his mother, stoic and strong, cries when he asks her who the man is. He’s nine years old when Leia is almost elected First Senator. Ten years old when she embraces his lanky frame on the transports in front of a congregation of New Alderaanian diplomats._ Be a good boy, Ben, _she says. Her diadem is opalescent. Her dress smells like pressed black-lilies. Very professional._

_Palpatine tells him his mother never wanted him, that his parents sent him away because they have always been scared of him, that Leia lost the election because her father, Anakin Skywalker, was really Darth Vader and Ben is going the same way. He tells Ben_ you’re a monster _after the Jedi temple burns in unnatural flames. He thinks of reaching out to his mother, who he hasn’t seen in years, and Palpatine murmurs,_ you can never go back to them, but you can come to me and I will make you more powerful than they ever feared.  
  
  
  
  
Rey wakes up the next cycle and vomits. The bile can’t be expunged from her throat. 

She remembers Palpatine’s rancid words. The calcite whites of his eyes. The way he weaponized love, made artillery shells out of it, made armies out of fathers killing sons and sons killing fathers. She thinks about his order to bring his newborn granddaughter to him _—_

_Weak, like your parents._

Once, when she was sure of her place in the universe, she told the Emperor she would never hate him, even if it was all he wanted of her.  
  
  
  
  
In the eleventh cycle, Rey descends into the underworld.

She helms the skimmer through the whirlpooling oceans of Kef Bir, lands the ship on the bank of the Death Star. The desolate wind whistles all around her. The Dark Side of the Force seeps out of the sunken space station. Rey steps over a stormtrooper’s helmet and hears the murmurs of officers _just carrying out orders_ , ignition keys charging superlasers, prisoners forced to watch their home worlds and everyone they’ve ever loved explode. 

There are many screams, many whimpers. Rey absorbs all of it. She feels like she’s ferrying the souls of the undead. Ben. Leia. Herself.

Rey crosses the threshold into the Emperor’s hidden vault. There is no more fear left in her. She remembers Kylo’s words.

_The dark side is in our nature. Surrender to it._

Palpatine’s wayfinder sings tunelessly to her in the Tartarean darkness. She catches a glimpse of herself in the murky mirrors. Her dispassionate gaze. In the airless chambers, her flowing white fabrics seem to fossilise. She looks like an ivory statue. Unreal.

“I’ve come to speak to you.” Rey brandishes the lightsaber in the dark like a torch. 

Her Sith self emerges slowly out of the shadows. Lithe, hooded in a sumptuous satin cloak. The shade reminds her of krykna spiders. She’s carrying the double-bladed saber like a sceptre. Her skin is pale, unblemished. With the glittering dress and the amulet in her hair, she doesn’t look like she’s ever been a scavenger, or that she's ever known hunger cleaving to a ribcage.

“You’ve come to realise your fate,” Empress Palpatine states. Her voice is accented. Queenly. 

The Empress circles her. Rey realises that the lustre of the Empress’ appearance is some kind of Force Glamour. 

“I’ve come to make a bargain.” She knows all about bargaining. Rey closes her eyes and thinks about all she covets: ten kisses like crushed pomegranate seeds. Ben’s hand over hers. Quarter portions of a life. 

She is so very tired of losing him. 

_You wish to save the boy._

The Empress smiles. Shark-like. She shows her. 

_The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural._  
  
  
  
  
This time, when Kylo offers her his hand, Rey doesn’t refuse. She doesn’t cry _._ She has traded all her tears away.

“You know what you need to do. You know.” 

She thinks about the firelight dancing off the ridges of Ben’s face. Extinguished candles. A vaulted bride-bed, the sepulchre of Exegol. No body to bury. 

“I do.”

Rey grasps his gloved hand. Her fingers are as cold as stalagmites.  
  
  
  
  
In the beginning, there was the bond, as thin and tenuous as a piece of scarlet thread. 

In this beginning, the New Emperor and Empress wield twin bloodred lightsabers smelted from pure chromium. The sabers are phosphorescent against Exegol’s mineral lakes. The darkness sibilates all around them, gathering under their hooded capes. In Exegol’s twilight, in the suave, unprocessed electricity of their bond, a weapon more destructive than the Death Star is born. _Two that are one._ A live wire, volatile and spectacular. 

They decimate the Knights of Ren. When one of the Knights nearly chops off Kylo’s hand, Rey Force chokes him to death.  
  
  
  
  
This time, when Leia calls out for her son, they’re duelling side-by-side against the Emperor’s imperial guards. 

_Ben—_

Words set down in a force field. 

Kylo’s steps falter. He turns, his face waxen. His mother’s life is blown out like a guttering candle. 

Rey feels his grief implode. _Leia._ A thermonuclear explosion amplified by the bond. A heatwave washes over them. Sceptic, skin-peeling pain. Ben swings his lightsaber like something feral. From the periphery, she sees the guard ambushing Ben from behind, raising his electrostaff high with its terrible sizzling—

She outstretches her hand, and lightning courses through her blood. The guards drop dead, their corpses steaming.

Rey unbolts the bond, fuses Ben’s agony to hers. _We’ll kill him, together._ Their Force energies compound upon each other—

The Emperor electrocutes her. Binds Rey and Ben on their knees, in supplication.  
  
  
  
  
“Did you think you could kill me so easily?”

The Old Emperor glides over to examine them, his decaying body suspended by the machine. The Sith Throne looms over them. Rey can scarcely hear him over the ringing in her ears.

He inspects her jutting chin. Her tigerish eyes, the bloodred lightsaber. Her burned, cadaverous skin.

“You are more of my grandchild than I expected.” 

He turns his head to address Ben. His chalky, pupil-less eyes take in his convulsions. Rey can smell Palpatine’s breath, foul and pestilent. 

“And Ben Solo,” Palpatine hisses. “I offered you a new empire, and you went off running to this girl. Sentimental. Weak, like your father and mother.” 

Ben flinches. 

Palpatine cackles. He levitates both of their bodies. 

“You think you can kill me and both ascend to the throne? You forget the Rule of Two. Only one master and one apprentice. Only one of you can strike me down.”

Palpatine smiles and crooks a mouldering finger. “And I am partial to my granddaughter.”

Ben struggles against invisible restraints.

“As once I fell, so falls the last Skywalker.”

He throws Ben down the reactor shaft. 

Rey screams, and the planet shakes.  
  
  
  
  
Palpatine lets her fall to the ground. 

“Welcome home, Empress Palpatine.” 

It’s the first time she’s been awake to see Ben’s body hurled backwards into that bottomless pit. Her hatred thrums under the surface, voltaic. She Force pulls Ben’s discarded lightsaber towards her. Rises. 

“You promised me he would live,” she rasps. She grits her teeth to keep her temper in check. Palpatine laughs mirthlessly. 

“I told you that it was your birthright to rule. Strike me down. Take the throne. Only you have the power to save him. You don’t have long.” 

If she focuses, Rey can sense Ben’s Force signature in the abyss, a blue flame in the dark. The polyrhythmic patterns of their heartbeats. He’s alive. He’s managed to hang on to a sharp ridge. Just barely.  
  
  
  
  
She thinks about how, in a hundred visions and revisions, they always end up here. A maybe-Jedi and a maybe-Sith.

She reaches out and focuses on the Force of the planet. The primordial desert flats. The scuttling insects. Haze, sunless days, dioxin. Dust particles colliding. The Force like a fine vapour, a thundercloud. 

The Sith Eternal begin their chanting.

“She will draw her weapon.”

Rey ignites both of their crimson blades. Imagines, with all that powerful darkness—powerful light. Glow-lichen and whipweed blooming in mineral lakes. Bioluminescent orchids. The fiery crust of the planet, remade every millennia. In the furnace of her heart: that same fire. To raze planets. To shake the firmament of the galaxy.

“She will come to me.”

_Be with me. All the Jedi and the Sith._

“She will take her revenge.”

Rey raises both lightsabers, waxing red crescent moons—  
  
  
  
  
She hears Anakin Skywalker’s voice, stretched across time and space. So does Ben. 

_Bring back the balance, as I did._

She focuses on the air molecules around Ben’s prone form. 

The kyber crystal in her lightsaber vibrates violently. Mutates into an electric blue. 

She plunges both blades—cobalt and crimson—into Palpatine’s gnarled heart. 

The world is torn asunder.  
  
  
  
  
Ben rises out of the void. Limps towards her prostate body, stumbles by her side. 

Rey's eyes are lustreless. The stench of smoke and dying musk-roses all around. There are no more voices in Ben’s head.

Ben reaches out, remembers old legends. Old tragedies. A Sith Lord who could stop others from dying.

He amasses all the strength he has left. He uses the bond as a surgical knife, extracts all the poison from her bloodstream. Breathes out.  
  
  
  
  
She wakes, gasping, in his arms. His ebony hair, matted with sweat and grime, contrasts with the pallor of his face. 

She has gone to the underworld and back for him. He’s followed her.

_Don’t be afraid._

He tries to smile for her. She’s reminded of nightblossoms opening their petals, for just a few hours, in the dark.

_I feel it too._

Rey kisses him, all kinetic energy. Static down the spine. 

The bond diffuses with his body. Like chemicals dissolved in water.    
  
  
  
  
It is the morning of the last day of the war. Rey wakes up to a sullen sky over Ajan Kloss, aching for rain. She tastes metal on her lips.  
  
She wants answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Arsonist's Lullaby" by Hozier
> 
> It is the evening of the last day of the year where I am right now--happy New Year's Eve, everyone. Thank you so much for all your support of this fic. It's been a wild Reylo year. Dark!Rey is just so Herculean and heart-breaking to write. I promise less angst, more answers in 2020! 
> 
> Next chapter: Rey revisits the Mirror Cave in Ahch-To, and has an illuminating conversation with an old teacher.


	6. Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smut!hut. This chapter has an E/M rating.

5

_Hope is like the sun. If you only believe it when you see it, you'll never make it through the night._

Rey thinks Leia was wrong. Because Rey knows hope, irradiant and cauterizing like the harsh Jakku sun. She’s _burning_ from it. The white-hot flare of the bond, the ultraviolet radiation from their kiss, a secret smile like candlewick flowers. Hope is her calcified lungs on fire. Ben’s celestial body. 

Rey skyjacks a Resistance ship, ignores the panicked comms of everyone: Rose, Snap, Kaydel, Poe, Finn, Leia. She just lets herself glide in space, over the Unknown Regions. There is no war, no time. There is no gravity to her grief. From lightyears away, Ahch-To looks like a planet made of nothing but water.

Rey thinks about the way Ben looked at her when she awoke from death. Like she was the very core of the universe. His impossibly large hand over her abdomen. His eyes as pure and bright as any Ilum crystal.

Rey lands on that beautiful ocean-island she dreamed of as a child, and demolishes every totem pole she can find. 

The sky cracks open and rain pelts down on her. Cumulonimbus clouds, white as phosphorus, roll over the rocky archipelago. Lightning strikes Luke’s hut, setting the salvaged X-Wing metal ablaze.

She imagines her body as a conduit of that electrical discharge. Imagines redirecting all that dreadful lightning back into that godforsaken selfsame sky. 

Rey fists her hands, lets the sooty, grainy rain streak down her face. The wind caterwauls around her.

She screams and screams for the Jedi, for Luke, for _someone, anyone_ to guide her until her throat is hoarse.  
  
  
  
  


When at last the storm clears, and petrichor begins to emanate from the soil, she hears the slightest breeze in the Force. 

It’s not Luke. She almost begins to feel disappointed when she realises it’s Kylo. 

His Force presence rises over the borderlands of her consciousness like an enormous, dark kitehawk. She can sense his anger simmering like nitrogen in primeval lakes, the hurt clouding his mind in noxious fumes. And in the undergrowth of that burning wilderness—the tiniest tendril of concern. Not full-blown _compassion_ but something more primal. She marvels at it: a flame-lily out of the scorched land. For her. For all the anguish she’s projecting into their bond. 

Kylo’s not wearing a mask. His raven hair is slicked back with sweat. His gaze bores into her, taking in her soaked tunic, her clammy hands, her wan skin. The windswept strands falling out of her buns. 

She’s jarred into a memory that is not hers: _smashing the lightsaber down on one of the Knights of Ren, her piercing scream, all the wind knocked out of him, blurred limbs, an executioner’s axe nearly hacking off his hand, an upsurge of electricity on the Dreadnought, a torrential downpour of emotion that is not his—_

_Where are you?_

His gravelly voice, low and urgent, echoes all around her.

_If I tell you, will you kill me?_ Rey asks even-handedly. 

She knows he won’t. The scar splits his face in two, and Rey feels a savage bent of appreciation that some part of him, even as Kylo Ren, in every iteration is claimed as _hers._

He steps closer, his cape sweeping over the coarse grass. His proximity reminds her of their confrontation on Pasaana—how she'd been able to smell the molten iron fusing the fragments of his mask together. If she reached out now to caress his cut cheek, she could number the strange constellations of his birthmarks. 

Kylo can feel the spike in her heart rate, the way her breath hitches. She’s remembering the beginning of the Force Bond, the hot, heady spell of another mind soldered to hers. The effulgence overflowing the bond, like liquid gold, when they touched hands. Two soldiers on opposite ends of a war. 

_I don’t want to have to kill you_ , Kylo says slowly. Meditatively. _I’m going to turn you to the Dark Side. I feel your pain, your anger—_

Rey seizes his unfinished thought— _like a lightsaber wound in my chest_.

He continues staring. The same haunted, needy expression he had on the Supremacy, with his hand outstretched amongst the flames of the Throne Room. A world ripped apart, in trains of fire. The ardency of Kylo’s plea, the way he asked her to be his Empress with his _eyes._

(Kylo remembers a scavenger girl standing over him in the snow. Vindictive and glittering in the vermilion glow of his lightsaber. The soft hail all around them. The tectonic plates shifting beneath his feet, the harrowing precipice of the proposal he’d offered her: _let me show you the ways of the Force._ )

_You’re still holding on,_ he tells her. His jaw is set, broad shoulders squared. _The Jedi won’t save you._

Rey looks up at him, meeting his unwavering stare. Charcoal eyes caught afire. She sees the boy curled up in dreamless sleep like a question mark. The sickly, glaucous green of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. 

She thinks about how many cycles it’s been since the time loop started. How lonely she’s felt, unmoored across lightyears. Pulled back into Ben’s orbit, again and again. The bond like barbed wire, tethering them into something dangerous and electrifying. The sheer _wanting_ raking into her.

_Yes._ Rey says it aloud. Startles him. _The Jedi won’t save me._

Ben will save her, does save her.

She breathes out. Steady. Remembers that in this timeline, Ben is still alive, yoked to her. Not yet the morning stars with dews of blood, nor the disasters in the sun. Not yet a body like moondust.

_If I tell you where I am, will you come to me? Alone?_

She transmits the coordinates, takes his hand. A honing beacon through hyperspace. Stuns all the noise of his brain into stillness. She catches that damn twitch under his left eye.

_Join me. Please._

  
  
  


In this timeline, Kylo Ren has not yet gone to Mustafar. He has not yet found the Emperor.

In this timeline, Kylo Ren flies to Ahch-To for the Emperor’s granddaughter.

Rey shouldn’t be surprised that Kylo has kept his promise after seeing Ben die for her time after time, but seeing him so solemn, so stately without his guards makes her remember shuttling herself off in an escape pod from the Millennium Falcon. Watching her breath fog up the window to outer space. Submitting to the First Order stormtroopers. She’d wondered then, fleetingly, if flying out to the _Supremacy_ on her own free will had been a mistake; now she imagines Kylo doing the same. Weighing the risks. Piloting his personal TIE-fighter to the Unknown Regions, deleting his unsanctioned departure from the ship logs. Trying to see if Rey is a trap. Trying to see if he can lay a trap for her.

When he lands, Rey half-expects to see the Knights of Ren trailing behind him. His expression is inscrutable when he senses the thought. 

“I never lie to you,” he says. He stands too close. 

"I know," Rey responds. And then, a non-sequitur: "No one knows I'm here. Not even your mother." 

At the mention of Leia, Kylo's face is set like flint. 

For the length of the galaxy’s heartbeat, they just study each other. Someone else, a First Order general, might have thought they were sizing each other up. But Kylo makes no move to disarm her. In the unforgiving daylight, Rey can see his cracked lips, the color of coma-bloom. The dark circles under his eyes like the rings of a gravethorn tree. She sees a man with the weight of the universe on his shoulders: prince, smuggler’s son, galactic conquerer, Jedi youngling, Sith apprentice. 

“Why did you call me here?” He asks at last.

They are both so very still, as if dancing around a rancor pit. 

Rey dares to look up, drink in the sight of him. Ben's tall figure against beehive huts and birdsong in the wet morning. Despite how terrible he looks, she wants hopelessly. The bronze flecks of his hazel eyes. The curvature of his back as they held each other in death's embrace.

She turns away for a half second, overwhelmed. She searches his feelings because she knows hers. 

Wordlessly, she hands him the Skywalker saber. 

“No weapons. No fighting.”

Something about her tone, its measured terror, convinces him to unhook his crossguard saber and pass it to her with a tight-lipped nod. His gloved hand skims over hers. The exchange feels oddly intimate. The hilt is warm, crafted from heat-hardened industrial alloy. She memorizes the grooves in the metal. 

It reminds her of the imprint of his fingers on her chest.

"I don't know where to begin," she says, and her voice gives a little at the end.

She thinks: I have kissed you a thousand times. I know you through a thousand faces. 

He continues his scrutiny of her. He can sense her trepidation. His jawline is impossibly soft. 

"Show me."

  
  
  


The hut hasn't aged. Monastic simplicity. Even the blaster hole from the time she fired her gun through their force bond remains, the debris of another lifetime. She can see the sea stretched out in between the stones. The window and its absentee sunbeams. The Lanai caretakers are nowhere to be found. Rey and Kylo sit across from each other, with the dying embers of the night they touched scattered between them. 

"Your Force presence," Kylo says. He shifts his gaze from the dried logs of the fireplace to her mouth, reminding her of their elevator conversation on the Supremacy. "It feels different today. I couldn't sense you at first. Why?"

Yes, Rey thinks. Two that are one. There is a dam in her throat.

Purposefully, incrementally, she reaches for his hand. She thinks: easier than to speak. The Skywalker saber glints in the cold light on his right hip, and Rey isn't afraid. Kylo's skin under her touch is a mountain range. She tears down all her mental shields, one by one, the tide of her breathing washing over the bond. She opens her mind, frees all its gushing rivers, the great lakes of memory, lets go, lets him in—

_Because part of me is you_. _Your life force._

They are together, the Jedi Killer and the Jedi, and the world is not ending.

She shows him their once and future past. Like a dusty holocron from a bygone era, a lost video tape from a forgotten temple on repeat— _she kisses him again and again, and loses track of how many times he dies in her arms_ —

The room is full of ghosts.

He latches onto the lilac bruises, the rivulets of tears down her cheeks, how she heals the crater in his chest. How he turns. 

_I did want to take your hand_

_I did want to take your hand—_

_Ben, Ben, Ben—_

He can't stop watching how she looks at him, in the end. 

When the force meld is over, Rey's eyes are unnaturally bright. She withdraws her hand, and Kylo's entire body, from his feet to the crown of his head, feels like a deadweight, anvilstone in the rocky worlds of Rarlech. 

The bond throbs in the back of his brain.

He thought she hated him; how she'd shut him out, closing the hatch lock to the Millennium Falcon. _A monster in a mask._

"That was not a prophecy," he says, guardedly. "That was the future." 

He looks like a starship pilot with bloodburn. The skywards gaze, his too-sallow skin. His pupils darkening into onyx stones.

"Yes," Rey whispers, and Kylo's world turns.

She touches him again on his shoulder, trying to ground him, but the movement echoes so many other movements he's just felt—on Exegol, on the Death Star—that he jerks, trying to place what timeline they're in. There's a wildness, an unintended edge to her desperation that seeps through her fingertips.

_I did want to take your hand._

Even in this iteration, she looks at him as if he's made of Light. 

His mind is dispersed across a million parsecs. The dyad. Leia. Palpatine's return. 

(He distantly remembers telling Snoke: by the grace of your training, I will not be seduced.)

But _she kissed him every time._

"Yes," Rey repeats in a low voice. 

The _yes_ pulses through the bond. An open wound. A brutal, brokered ceasefire.

She is so very tired, his star-crossed scavenger.

(In another iteration, they are straining against the bond, mangling metal spaceships in antediluvian deserts, just to feel that razor-sharp mind, that coil of Force energy from the other—)

The Force hangs in the balance. 

_Just you_ , he thinks, and the admission saps the fight out of him. 

The war is white noise. 

He has had dreams of this, of this fireside hut where the future was within reach, of this girl who beat him into the ground with a quarterstaff, of carefully stripping her of her threadbare cotton wrappings, of covering her bloodied, obstinate mouth with his, of opening the secret place between her suntanned, strong, sylphlike legs with his fingers, one at a time—and for once he does not wake up hard, soaked in his own sweat, ashamed and _wanting_ on the imperial star destroyer hunting her down. 

Rey's eyes are impossibly wide. Kylo's projecting but he doesn't _care._

This is the one prophecy that has always been right. 

It's obscene how beautiful she is. Her lips part—Candilin orange, Geldan sun-apple, firebud—which have _kissed him a thousand times,_ letting out a small, strangled moan.

He did not think she would ever—

" _Ben_ —" 

Kylo _breaks._

Rey's brain short-circuits.

She's kissed him, but not like _this_. 

Not with the lightning flashes of his arousal stroking hers, not with him so hungry and aggressive—

His tongue slips into her mouth and he's thrusting his hips, shaking—their teeth clash clumsily but Rey can't focus on anything but the heat from the friction, how all of her wants all of him—Kylo groans when she _whimpers._

She's thought about this, of course, but this is so much better than her furtive sessions in the AT-AT walker or in the Resistance bunks, the way she'd tried to fuck herself on her fingers after seeing him shirtless in just a fresher towel, after Kylo's too-large hand guiding the small of her back on the Supremacy, after their fight against the Praetorian Guards, his hand splayed on her thigh, dominant and haughty and insistent—she'd nearly sobbed that time she came, imagining him touching her this way in the Throne Room, feeling guilty after she spent, because he was the enemy— 

Kylo growls, tugging her hairbuns not-so-lightly as he sears her with another bruising kiss. The feedback loop of their bond unbolts, and everything comes undone and undone.

The lightsabers have long been discarded. 

She can see herself: her flushed, suntanned face. The possessive worship with which Kylo unwraps her cloth bands, his calloused fingers exploring the valley between her breasts, his tongue tasting her pebbled nipples like jewel-fruits—

She arches into his inexorable touch. Grasps how, in another life, she came close to razing down planets for this. She could have conquered empires for this. 

There's a keening in how she grips the nape of his neck, the arrangement of love bites down his chest. Like she's afraid she will wake up on Ajan Kloss and there will be the same roiling ocean separating them.

Rey kneels and uses the Force to wave away Kylo's thick, impractical robes. He breathes out a dry laugh, so Ben-like it makes everything hurt. When she releases his cock, holds it stiff and aching and glistening wetness all over her hand, Kylo has shut his eyes again. 

"Rey," his voice is hoarse. So raw with adoration. 

Yes, he would die for her.

Even on her knees, she is resplendent. Her tawny hair falling all around her, her copper eyes meeting his. 

It's almost too much. He swears as she swallows around his cock—a strangulated utterance.

Later, when Kylo enters her, methodical and tender, Rey cries out, just once. She is so very full. She feels completely split open, a ravaged desert plum without the pit—impossibly wet and lewdly ripe, her body brimming with pleasure—

Her hips, once so haggard, cant upwards. Kylo places lush open-mouthed kisses on the side of her neck, sucking hard. Rey commands him: _more._

Kylo pins down her arms, tightly interlocking their fingers. Somehow that feels more wanton than anything else: his hands engulfing hers as he fucks her, wave upon wave of pleasure crashing on the shore of them. 

Their clothes levitate lightly from the dirt floor. 

Kylo's forehead is glossed with sweat, and Rey—she marks him, every inch of his milkstone skin. To remember he is a body of muscle, not moondust. To commit to the sound he makes, violent and _ruined_ , when she permits herself to say it, choking and calamitous like a warrior the night before the unwinnable battle—

_I love you._

They linger as long as they can, but they know that the ghosts are closing in. 

"I can't lose you again," Rey mutters into Kylo's shoulder. 

Kylo's fingers card through her loosened hair. 

"We'll defeat him. Together," he says. His eyes flicker like coal.

(Somewhere on the island, the birds, sensing a singular and peculiar weather change, leave their nests.)

"There must be something to break the cycle," Rey says. She reluctantly rises from Kylo's side. "I tried looking in the Jedi books. But there was nothing in the _Aionomica_ _—_ just a drawing of a dyad, the same symbol I saw in Luke's training pond."

A shadow passes over Kylo's face. "You won't find the answer there."

He straightens himself, looks out at the sea. 

"The cave, the place that called to you that night—it's nearby, isn't it?"

Rey remembers a maelstrom of glacial black waters. Granite tunnels, underground draughts. A thousand of her selves turning in unison.

Kylo, seeing the shards of her memory, clasps her hand. His thumb traces flight patterns onto her skin, radiating warmth.

_You're not alone,_ he vows. 

They journey in silence to the blackened brambles, withered and weedy on the perimeter of the ridge. The bleeding bowels of the island. 

Rey inhales once, sharp. Falls headlong through the gaping hole. Kylo follows her, plunging into darkness.

They crawl out of the starless lake, the water just as freezing as Rey warned. The wind howls and howls. 

They stand in front of the mirror. He takes her hand. The movement duplicates forevermore. A thousand dyads joining together.

Now that they are near enough to breathe on the surface, Kylo sees the crystalline stone is cracked. Like the gossamer lines of microsutures that once repaired his face.

(Rey's hand in his feels like picking moonglow, pear-like and delicious and poisonous.)

They sense another's presence at the same time. Kylo slides his other hand to unfasten his lightsaber, about to ignite the blade, when Rey gasps.

Opposite the mirror, in a parallel universe—a human figure emerges from the same waters, heaving herself up on the craggy wasteland. She wears a grey vest with her hair pulled back, cut to her shoulders. She is very much alone. 

Entranced, they watch her snap her fingers, the sound reverberating across the hollowed caverns. 

"Let me see my parents. Please," she begs, the granddaughter of the Emperor, and Kylo wants to catch this Rey's hands, too, in mid-plea. Kiss every knuckle. 

Rey—his Rey—turns to him, her face curiously wet. 

"Ben," she says. 

_The belonging you seek is not behind you._

(The other Rey is staring at them but not at them, her expression naked with anguished longing. Her fingers outstretched against the misty mirror, to the silhouettes just beyond her.)

"It was us," Rey continues, hushed. Unheard from the other side. "I saw us, that time, from the future."

Kylo presses her hand tightly. Rey places her other palm to the icy reflection.

The Force surrounds them—all static, tangents in the air. It sings, siren-like, from the crevices of subaqueous rock, to the century flowers on the cliffside, to the cloud formations—

Kylo recognizes, with a jolt, precisely where they are. Long nights spent chasing down the ghost of the Emperor across the galaxy, the wayfinders mapping some invisible citadel where the dead speak again, tomes of Sith folklore—

They are not on Ahch-To, they have never been on Ahch-To—

_The world between worlds._

Before he can shatter the mirror, before he can tell Rey to find him—

Kylo wakes up to the cold expanse of space. He's in his quarters on the Steadfast. Outside the viewport window, the world is sunless and moonless. His mouth tingles, on the tip of forgotten words, and his chest carries blemishes the color of purple stingwort. It is the morning of the last day of the war.

_Rey?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Song: "Moondust" by Jaymes Young
> 
> Author's Note: I'm back! I'm so sorry for my terribly slow updates with this fic. This chapter was absolutely gruelling to write (HOW DO PEOPLE WRITE SEX SCENES). Future chapters will pivot to Kylo's perspectives during the last day of the war. I'm thinking of shortening the fic to two or three more chapters instead of four. Thank you again for all of your comments during my hiatus. I'll do my best to reply to your kind words over the next few days. I'm still invested in this epic time-travelling Reylo saga, but 2020 has been... apocalyptic so far, to say the least. My heart goes out to everyone affected by coronavirus and the fallout around the world. Please take care, wash your hands, stay at home if you can, and look out for one another!


End file.
